Top 5 Osama Bin Laden Cyber Scams

Links that promise footage of Osama bin Laden’s death are probably just viruses. Here are some other scams for which you should be on the lookout.

Have you received emails or seen Facebook links that promise video footage of Osama bin Laden's death, photos of the body, or any other bin Laden-related tidbits? Chances are, the messages are spam and, unless you're looking to infect your PC with a virus, it's best to delete.

Analysts with firms like Sophos, McAfee, Imperva, and Zscaler have all put together blog posts that detail some of the bin Laden-related scams that are making the rounds.

Sophos analyst Grahahm Cluley said that a Facebook link claiming to contain a video of bin Laden's death has been spreading virally on the social-networking site.

Cluley's colleague Paul Ducklin, meanwhile, warned users that "many of the links you see will be perfectly legitimate links. But at least some are almost certain to be dodgy links, deliberately distributed to trick you into hostile internet territory."

"If in doubt, leave it out!" Ducklin warned.

Security firm Imperva had a similar warning. "Hackers love a big, breaking story. We've seen this with Michael Jackson's death and [now] we see it with Bin Laden's death," the company said.

"We don't have any examples yet. But with any large news event like this, we expect a flurry of e-mails, and likely black hat search engine operations trying to take advantage of the event to distribute malware," the group wrote.

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